Album Review: TV Priest - "My Other People"

 

18 months may be a commendably quick turnaround time between albums but in the fickle world of the music business it can seem like an eternity if you're unlucky with your timings. When TV Priest unleashed their debut album Uppers in February last year, they were clearly aligning themselves with the uncompromising political post-punk scene that Idles and Fontaines DC had taken overground in the previous 12 months and it seemed like a smart move even if they weren't quite on the same level as the former's Ultra Mono or the latter's A Hero's Death. A bit of fine tuning and the theory would seem to have been that they'd be well placed to surf the wave with the follow-up.

Unfortunately the time period since has seen both Idles and Fontaines deliver underwhelming follow up albums with the former's Crawler and the latter's Skinty Fia being pale copies of what had come before, jettisoning the hooks and intrigue for blaring irritating atonalism and tunelessness. All of a sudden, what was white hot property not so long ago now looks distinctly like last year's thing. And when you were regarded as one of the latter bands to break through after the leg work had already been done, as rightly or wrongly TV Priest were, the worry has to be there that the sands you built your musical house on could very easily be destroyed by the tide at this point.

And sadly My Other People isn't gonna be the album to save this band from that situation by the looks of things. For all the defiance in the press release where the group claim to be trying to move away from the preconceptions people have of them (ie "What, poor man's Idles? Us? Nah, you must have the wrong band guv, honest..."), this album blunders straight into nearly every trap that held its predecessor back - blaring vocals which just become tedious after a few tracks, obtuse lyrics that just fail to land a mark the way that, say Idles' Mr Motivator did and a general lack of top drawer hooks and tunes.

There's still plenty of effort and energy in here and that has to be a good thing but the likes of Limehouse Cut, Bury Me In My Shoes and the sadly appropriately titled I Have Learnt Nothing are the sound of a band who just haven't moved their sound forward enough to escape the tidal wave that you suspect is bearing down on this genre all too quickly.

Sadly it looks as if TV Priest will be remembered as the Adverts to the Idles' Sex Pistols - a promising band at the beginning who missed the opening to move on and develop their sound when they had it and ended up divebombing back into obscurity as quickly as they'd arrived. A real shame.

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